6th October 2011 Archive

This is the second of a three-part series on the convergence of HPC and business analytics, and the implications for data centers. The first article is here; you’re reading the second one; and the third story is coming soon.

Maintainers of the open-source Apache webserver are warning that their HTTP daemon is vulnerable to exploits that expose internal servers to remote attackers who embed special commands in website addresses.

Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff probably didn’t want to be at Oracle's OpenWorld extravaganza in San Francisco today, even after making a fuss about Oracle yanking his keynote on Wednesday. That's because Salesforce.com and SAP were the punching bags this afternoon while Oracle CEO and Benioff's former boss, Larry Ellison announced the availability of the Fusion suite of applications and the Oracle Public Cloud.

If the name of this hard drive isn’t explicit enough, one look at it will tell you exactly who it’s aimed at. The brushed aluminium surround and smoky black top mean that it looks right at home sitting beneath an iMac or Apple Cinema Display.

To Manchester, where I had been invited to liven up a Conservative Conference Fringe discussion on digital policy. I shared the panel with influential moderatrix Dominique Lazanski, a former Yahoo!er who recently got the Pirate Party into the Culture Ministry; a young parliamentary candidate called Nick Pickles who had worked with Big Brother Watch; and Jeff Lynn of Coadec, a new group flush with lobbying cash from Google and Yahoo!

Reg Reader and Stockport dweller Rob was shocked to find that trying to save his mother a few pounds on her gas bill ended up pushing the tab up £13,088.43, rather than down the 20 quid he was expecting. It was the unlikely result of entering a meter reading on Southern Electric's website.

Italian Wikipedia has been hidden in protest at a new Act making its way through the Italian Parliament. The Wiretapping Act or "DDL intercettazioni" could make Wikipedia legally untenable in Italy if it passes into law.

NHS staff should be more aware of data security risks as patient confidentiality "is at the heart of what they do", Jonathan Bamford, head of strategic liaison at the Information Commissioner's Office has said.

Telco operators have a wonderful habit of neither listening nor being rational when local loop unbundling is ever mentioned. The reactions, spread across the European press, to the two consultations announced by Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice President for the Digital Agenda, mostly accuse her of being mad and her ideas unworkable.

LibreOffice users ought to update their software: a security hole has been discovered in the code used to import Microsoft Word documents into the open-source productivity suite. The latest version of the software contains a fix for the problem.

CERN’s decision to release data about its “superluminal neutrino” experiments at an early stage is providing the world with a rare insight into the process of scientific peer review. Another small step in that process in relation to the fascinating OPERA results asks whether general relativity can be called in to help explain the results.

There are many characteristics about Australia that people from other countries don’t get: dangerous animals, a big empty country, political angst over an economy that stubbornly fails to plunge into recession, and so on. But two I’d like to single out here are TV and the Internet.